Time for action – making the circle

The circle is unseen, but important. It provides the basis on which to place all the spokes for the ship's wheel. Execute the following steps to make the circle:

1. Press Shift + A, and then select the circle from the Mesh menu.
2. In the Add Circle subpanel of Tool Shelf, set the Vertices to 8.
3. Set the Radius to 0.25.
4. Press A to deselect all objects and press 5 on the NumPad to put 3D View into Ortho mode.

What just happened?

It doesn't look like much, but you will use the circle to control the placement of the spokes of the ship's wheel. There are eight vertices in the circle, so your wheel will have eight spokes. Blender has a method called DupliVerts that lets you put a copy of the spoke at each vertex of the circle. These copies are called instances. The difference between regular objects and instances is that whatever change you make to one instance is made to all of them. This is exactly what Ivan Sutherland was talking about when he...